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Misleading Online Recipes

August 27, 2014

The internet is both a wonderful and terrible thing. Anything is possible, literally. You can learn to build your own house simply by watching YouTube videos, or discover awesome, exotic fruits you have never heard of before.
You can easily find recipes for anything. ANYTHING. You can also be burned (pun intended) by those said recipes, and burned badly. According to various sources there are anywhere between 10,000-35,000 food blogs on the web. That’s not to say terrible recipes are a new or entirely online phenomenon. This has been happening for a long time. I’m looking at you 500 Tasty Snacks: Ideas for Entertaining’sJellied Bouillon with Frankfurters recipe.

Okay, maybe bad online food recipes are a new kind of awful. Anyone with eyes (actually, you don’t even need eyes, saying that would be an insult to blind people everywhere) and a brain can tell that making a jelly out of eggs and hotdogs is a terrible idea that should be avoided. I’m talking about recipes that look great—they have wonderful, high-def photos of delicious-looking food—but in reality are downright awful. Thus, why I’m calling them misleading.

What exactly makes a recipe misleading? Well, in my eyes all offenders are equally awful, but in their own special way. Some recipes allege to be delicious—photos of said results look appealing—yet, in practice, the food is disgusting, unfit for both human and animal consumption. Some recipes are a complete waste of everyone’s time. Take the Food Network’s Carrot-Ginger Salad. The title sounds great, but the recipe turns out to be meaningless—like, wow, thanks for putting all that effort in.

No matter the reason, the point here is that the misleading recipes go horribly wrong. You’re expectations are high, but you end up with food that looks something like this.

What can you do?

Give the recipe writer a taste of their own medicine.
Don’t eat it! Overnight mail the “results” to whomever wrote the recipe.

Join in.
Revenge can be good medicine. Nothing will make you feel better like making someone else miserable. You can even shoot for being the best bad recipe writer out there. Watch out though, you will have some serious competition.

Practice personal responsibility.
Yes, this last option is not as fun. BUT, sometimes you have to admit that maybe you’re cooking skills are not up to snuff, or that substituting 75% of the ingredients may have contributed to recipe failure.